Here’s Stephen Paul’s Top 3 picks from the latest round of Social Media Infographics. Say what you will about the tidal wave that is social media: it’s over-hyped, a fad halfway through its 15 minutes, that surely won’t be around in a few years’ time.
—–
Here’s Stephen Paul’s Top 3 picks from the latest round of Social Media Infographics.
First Up Infographic. Say what you will about the tidal wave that is social media:
it’s over-hyped, a fad halfway through its 15 minutes, that surely won’t be around in a few years’ time. But take a look at the Infographic below – the steep curve of the user growth rate in all age ranges and demographics, and the continuing pervasiveness of social media into every facet of work, play and life in general. It’s hard to argue that social media hasn’t changed forever how we interact and connect online. See for yourself. Here’s the Infographic:
Source: The Growth of Social Media: An Infographic
Next up Infographic. Small businesses are becoming savvier about social media.
And, increasingly, smaller-scale operations are turning to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media channels for promotions, customer acquisition, and sales leads. An impressive 75 percent of small businesses now have a presence on a social media site. Interestingly, 27 percent of small businesses are on Facebook, while 18 percent reside on LinkedIn, and just 7 percent use Twitter. This new data comes from CrowdSpring, a Web design firm that crowdsources all of its projects and that created the new Infographic below. Probably the most revealing social media stat here: 64 percent of Twitter users are more likely to buy the brands they follow or for which they’re a fan, compared with 51 percent of Facebook users. Here’s the full breakdown on usage at the top social media spots:
Source: Crowdsourced Logo and Graphic Design by crowdSPRING
Last up Social Media Infographic. From hurricanes and floods to earthquakes and wildfires, natural disasters affect the United States every year.
When it comes to being prepared for a disaster there are a number of basic items to include in your emergency kit, like water, food and a battery-powered or hand crank radio. However, armed with your smartphone and a knowledge of social media, you can be better prepared for an emergency situation. Here’s the Infographic:
If you keep up with social media marketing news, you already know that if Facebook were a country, its 800 million users would make it the third most populous nation in the world. And, besides being the largest social network in the world (by far), it’s now the most popular website in the U.S., consistently beating out Google for the top spot.
If you keep up with social media marketing news, you already know that if Facebook were a country, its 800 million users would make it the third most populous nation in the world. And, besides being the largest social network in the world (by far), it’s now the most popular website in the U.S., consistently beating out Google for the top spot.
However, just because Facebook is the country’s stickiest site doesn’t necessarily mean that your Facebook page has any “stick” to it at all. How do you connect with your customers on Facebook, get them to engage and keep them coming back for more? Here are five social media marketing tips for increasing user engagement on your Facebook page.
Social Media Marketing Tip #1: Pick the low-hanging fruit first
Whenever you’re trying to improve your social media marketing, consider starting with the low-hanging fruit – the changes that you can make right away that offer a big return. When it comes to increasing user engagement on your Facebook page, the low-hanging fruit includes:
Respond to questions and comments right away
Post regularly
Run a poll, a quiz, a contest
Change your Facebook URL to something easy to remember (i.e., don’t allow your URL to stay as “http://Facebook.com/My-Company-Name/String-of-impossibly-long-numbers/”)
Social Media Marketing Tip #2: Time your posts to reach more users
We’ve found that big brands who post Facebook content outside of business hours have 20% more user engagement than brands who only post during the work day. And there are a number of social media marketing studies that concur with this.
Facebook user engagement for big brands peaks at three points each day: 7am EST, 5pm EST, and 11pm EST. In other words, user engagement peaks before people go to work, after they get off work, and just before bed time. If you post during the work day, there’s a good chance you’re missing out on your social media marketing user engagement windows.
However, different markets peak at different times. The entertainment industry peaks over the weekend – times when people might check out a movie or a concert. For the media industry, Mondays are weak, but the other weekdays are strong. Auto and retail brands see the most engagement on Sundays; healthcare, beauty, travel/hospitality, and fashion all peak on Thursday; and the business and finance industries peak on Wednesdays and Thursdays. If your business falls into one of these industries, post your content on days when user engagement is already naturally high.
Social Media Marketing Tip #3: Short ‘n sweet (except for URLs)
Posts of 80 characters or less – shorter than a long Twitter post – generate the most user engagement. However, when you include a full-length URL, as opposed to a bit.ly or tinyurl, people are three times more likely to click on it.
Along the same lines, if you want a post to generate more user engagement, ask them to respond to a simple question at the end of the post, such as “What new widget would you like XYZ Company to produce?” Do not put the question at the beginning of the post or buried somewhere in the middle – it is far less likely to be seen.
Social Media Marketing Tip #4: Get out of sell mode
Too many businesses still don’t understand that Facebook is about interaction; a Facebook page is not a newspaper advertisement and it’s not even a company website. If all your posts are sales-oriented — “Check out our sale!”, “Look at our new products!”, “Did you know we just got our fall items in?!” — very few people are going to comment on it, like it, or share it.
From a business perspective, Facebook is less like a sales meeting with a prospective new client and more like a networking meeting where you have a chance to meet contacts and build relationships. To be effective at social media marketing, instead of constantly talking about your products, throw in an occasional picture of a colleague’s new puppy or a bit of industry news from a website that’s not your own.
Social Media Marketing Tip #5: Ask for content in a compelling way
You might remember what poor Domino’s went through a few years ago when a couple of not-thinking-straight employees posted a video on YouTube demonstrating how to cough on, sneeze on, and otherwise molest an innocent pizza before shipping it out to the customer.
The video went viral, but Domino’s handled it well. One of their innovative responses was to fight fire with fire: They encouraged customers to send in photos and videos of the delicious pizzas they had received from Domino’s. The best entries would win $500 gift certificates. Dominoes leveraged social media marketing skillfully.
In the same way, consider following Domino’s lead and holding a video contest or photo contest on your Facebook page. Make the contest prize something worth competing for, then watch the content and social engagement pour in.
These are just five social media marketing tips to get your creative juices flowing when it comes to increasing user engagement on your Facebook page.
Nowadays everybody wanna talk like they got somethin’ to say
But nothin comes out when they move their lips
Just a bunch of gibberish
[They] act like they forgot about Dre.
— Rapper Eminem on rap legend Dr. Dre’s song, “Forgot About Dre”
Brand management for rappers is relatively straight-forward: if someone disses you in their lyrics or out of them, you write an even more clever lyric to dis them right back. Audiences will vote for the better rapper with their dollars.
If only corporations and CMOs could issue biting mix-tapes to defend themselves against their critics! What might such a defense look like?
Y’all know me, still the same Mickey D’s,
I been low key since SuperSize Me,
Hated on by Spurlock’s Gs.
But who gave you Big Macs,
Happy Meals an’ pancake stacks,
Chicken nuggets an’ BBQ snacks?
Yeah — you got somethin’ to say?? Shut yo traps!
On the other hand, perhaps it’s a good thing that CMOs don’t make mix tapes.
Online Brand Reputation Takes Style and Smarts
The online world is the Wild West when it comes to managing brand reputation. In the past, a disgruntled customer might tell a few friends about his bad experiences; these days, he publishes his experiences on his blog or on YouTube for the whole world to see. If he’s clever enough or influential enough, one blog post or video can go viral, and the brand quickly becomes the day’s laughing stock. Social media is great when it works in a brand’s favor; when it works against a brand, it can be a PR nightmare.
Today’s net-savvy CMO will focus on three main strategies for controlling negative internet press:
1. Keep an ear to the ground to detect upcoming waves of negative press;
2. Control where negative comments fall on the search engine results page (SERP);
3. Fight fire with fire by responding to negative comments swiftly and definitively.
Keeping an Ear to the Ground
The easiest way to find out what’s being said about a brand and what message about that brand is dominating is to run a Google search. However, a Google search only reveals what has already surfaced to the top of the conversation; to detect a negative trend before it starts, marketers should take advantage of “early alert systems”.
Google, Google News, Yahoo, Technorati, and other sites offer easy ways to monitor the ongoing online conversation. For instance, “Rob’s Pet Store” can set up a Google News alert so that the owner will receive an email whenever any news story that appears with the keywords “Rob’s Pet Store” appears in the news. Technorati lists popular tags used in the last month, as well as a daily list of Top 100 posts across the internet.
Google Alerts is one of the simplest of these tools to use. It allows users to set up a list of keywords for Google to monitor, and allows the user to choose which internet channels to monitor (i.e., blogs, video, news, forums, etc). Smart marketers will set up a few Google Alerts to monitor what’s being said both about their own brand and products, as well as competitors’ brands and products. This “early alert system” allows marketers to spot trouble for their brand’s reputation before it becomes unmanageable, and respond to problems immediately.
Controlling SERP Real Estate
Even if a company’s website has been properly optimized for search so that it falls consistently into the top three search engine results for certain keywords, the company can’t take up the whole first page of search engine results – or can it?
Any given website domain can only take up two or three search engine results, leaving about a dozen other results that may feature competitors’ websites or negative press. However, marketers can control more real estate on the SERP by using the following strategies:
1. Create multiple domains – for example, instead of relying only upon MyDomain.com for traffic, add Blog.MyDomain.com, Careers.MyDomain.com, News.MyDomain.com, MyDomain2.com, etc. Each of these alternate domains should contain proper SEO content with links back to the main domain.
2. Optimize press releases — any press release published online should be optimized and contain links back to the main domain.
3. Crowd out negative comments with positive ones — for example, when Domino’s Pizza faced a YouTube video featuring employees doing some naughty things to pizza, they responded with multiple positive YouTube videos of their own, pushing the bad video down in the search engine results (Source: iMediaConnection.com http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/26309.asp).
Fight Fire with Fire by Responding Immediately
In 2009, a Southwest Airlines plane had to make an emergency landing in West Virginia due to a huge hole in their fuselage. One of the most frightening possible events happened on the plane: after a loud POP!, the oxygen masks came down.
Internet-savvy passengers knew what to do – turn to Twitter. Within hours, photos taken by phone appeared online – a public relations disaster in the making (Source: AirCrewBuzz.com). However, Southwest knew what to do, too. They responded to social media conversation with social media of their own. First they tweeted about their official press release, then they followed up with another tweet stating that all their planes were inspected overnight, and finally they tweeted again to say that all the passengers on the holey flight were being fully refunded.
Too often, marketers feel like the social media conversation is outside their control, leading many to avoid that conversation altogether. For better or for worse, though, Facebook has enough users (500 million) that if it were a country, it would be one of the most populated in the world. Social media can no longer be ignored, so marketers instead should take an, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” attitude, while simultaneously monitoring and controlling the Facebook, Yelp, and Twitter tittering.
By monitoring the online conversation about their brand, controlling search engine real estate, and responding swiftly to any negative press, CMOs can successfully manage their brand’s reputation on the internet. Although the internet is still the Wild West for now, CMOs can appoint themselves as Sheriffs, and reign in the evildoers – not unlike Sheriff Dr. Dre and his Deputy Eminem reigning in those misbehaving, dissing rappers:
I told ’em all, all them little gangstas
Who you think helped mold ’em all?
Now you wanna run around talkin’ ’bout guns like I ain’t got none
What you think I sold ’em all?
Here’s today’s Facebook / Twitter riddle: What number do you get when you combine the populations of the states of Oregon, Oklahoma, Connecticut, Kansas, and Kentucky? Answer: Seventeen million, or the number of Americans who use Twitter (Source: ConvinceAndConvert.com).
Granted, proponents of Facebook scoff at the number 17 million; after all, Facebook boasts 500 million users, making 17 million look like a very small number. Meanwhile, social media experts like to complain that despite the number of Twitter accounts, many of them are not considered “active” like Facebook. They are accounts held by people who rarely tweet. Some have even claimed that Twitter was strictly a 2009 phenomena, and that Twitter is entering a long, slow decline that will eventually lead to its extinction as another internet species that just didn’t work out. (Friendster, anyone?)
However, Twitter is paying no attention to the naysayers; it is continuing to grow and continuing to prove itself a relevant part of the social media landscape. As one example of its relevance, residents of Egypt and other countries in the Middle East have been using Twitter to quickly disseminate information about the Egyptian crisis and general political unrest there (Source: Mashable.com).
Twitter naysayers might also be interested to learn that Twitter activity is growing, while Facebook activity is falling off. In recent months, Facebook has faced a 22% drop in time on the site per person, per day. Facebook has also seen a 26% drop in uploaded photos per month (Source: Blog.Hubspot.com).
In February 2010, Twitter hit 50 million tweets per day. In September 2010, that number had risen to 90 million tweets per day. In January 2011, Twitter reached 110 million tweets per day, with 200 million registered accounts.
Twitter’s growth isn’t limited just to the United States, although certainly Twitter usage continues to rise overall in the US (especially in western states – see the Hubspot link above). Just recently, Twitter added Korean to the languages users can tweet in, and as a result they experienced a 3,400% increase in Korean language tweets in 2010 (Source: Forbes.com). Twitter is also rapidly gaining ground in Japan.
New accounts, tweets, and languages aren’t the only signs of growth at Twitter. In an era where even Silicon Valley is experiencing massive layoffs, Twitter actually doubled the number of its employees between December 2009 and December 2010 (Souce: Forbes.com).
For Businesses, Twitter Followers Might be Better than Facebook Fans
The statistics mentioned above aren’t the only ones marketers should pay attention to. Even though they may not be tweeting about it, Twitter users are following brands far more rabidly than any other social media users. Consider that 49% of Twitter users follow companies or brands, but only 16% of social media users overall follow companies/brands. In fact, people using Twitter are three times more likely to follow their favorite brands with Twitter than Facebook users (Source: ConvinceAndConvert.com).
A report by ExactTarget reveals even more interesting differences between Twitter and Facebook users when it comes to interacting with brands. Here are a few of their findings:
• 37% of Twitter users say they are more likely to purchase a brand after becoming a follower, versus 17% of Facebook users
• 33% of Twitter users say they are more likely to recommend a brand after becoming a follower, versus 21% of Facebook users
• 49% of Facebook users said they were not more likely to purchase a brand after becoming a fan, and 47% said they were not more likely to recommend a brand after becoming a fan
• Daily Twitter users were twice as likely to purchase a brand than daily Facebook users
Twitter may become more popular than Facebook thanks to Smart Phones
Expressing yourself with 140 characters or less is especially convenient when you’re using a phone to do the expressing. With small screens and still maddeningly small letters, not to mention the occasionally annoying predictive text, the less you have to write with a mobile device, the better.
As more and more people turn to their mobile devices, tablet computers, and smart phones as one of their main sources of internet access, expect Twitter usage to grow even more. Already, 63% of Twitter users are accessing social networks through their phones (Source: ConvinceAndConvert.com). Since smart phone sales are expected to dominate the mobile device market in 2011, Twitter is likely to also win big.
Facebook fans: Don’t Leave Twitter Out
Although more than half of Twitter users don’t tweet themselves, this doesn’t mean they’re not reading the tweets of the people or businesses they follow. As the numerous statistics above show, average Twitter users might not be contributing much to the conversation, but they are certainly listening in.
Marketers and business owners should keep this in mind when they consider which social networks they use to actively promote their brands. With Mark Zuckerberg on the cover of Time magazine, it might be easy jump on the Facebook bandwagon and forget about Twitter. Instead, Facebook marketers should reconsider their Twitter strategy and figure out how to get the most out of each 140 characters.
Ah, the magic wand of Internet marketing. In the world of Harry Potter, the Elder Wand was supposed to be the most powerful wand ever created. In the hands of someone like Dumbledore, the Elder Wand was a powerful force for good. In the hands of evil Lord Voldemort, it would be a weapon of mass destruction.
Most wizards, including Internet marketing wizards, though, are neither Dumbledore nor Voldemort. Most wizards are well-meaning, but mediocre, less like heroes and more like Ronald Weasley. In the hands of these wizards, the Elder Wand was just another tool, not better or worse than any other wand. And so it can be said about Internet marketing wizards.
For Internet marketing professionals, the Internet is the Elder Wand. It is the most powerful Internet marketing tool ever created – that is, if a marketing wizard can wield it. For creative agencies like Wieden + Kennedy, who unleashed the viral Old Spice ads upon the online world, the Internet is a well-oiled machine responding easily to the most subtle guiding touch. For other agencies and companies, the living dinosaurs of their respective industries, understanding how to make an Internet marketing campaign go viral on Facebook or Twitter is like Ron Weasley trying to wield the Elder Wand.
The trouble these agencies have with Internet marketing can be divided into two broad categories: first, the Internet has fragmented consumer attention, and second, successful internet marketing means a two-way dialogue rather than a one-way soliloquy.
Internet marketing challenge = fragmented consumer attention
Prime time commercial TV spots on NBC, ABC, and CBS used to have a guaranteed audience. If a company ran the same ad for long enough during the Nightly News, soon the whole country would be humming the ad jingle. Today, with nearly 34 million owners of TiVo and other DVR services now recording their shows and fast-forwarding through the commercials, while other television consumers stream shows through their laptop, that ubiquitous jingle-humming is much harder to achieve.
Harder to achieve, yes, but not out of reach. The Internet has shattered the easy dominance of mass marketing channels, particularly the two giants of the field – television and newspaper. Knowing this, creative agencies can no longer rely upon a single television ad or group of ads to spread their marketing message. Instead, their success depends upon customizing their message in such a way that it gains a following via Internet marketing; on YouTube, spreads across Facebook, catches the attention of bloggers, and ends up with links from tweets.
On the one hand, the Internet provides the professional marketer with a dream come true: the Internet gives access to very particular demographics, with an ability to track precisely the responses of those demographics. On the other hand, the sheer number of marketing channels available through the Internet makes connecting with target audiences more daunting than ever. That is – if you are the marketing equivalent of Ron Weasley. If you are Dumbledore, these various channels represent new playgrounds of unprecedented creative Internet marketing opportunities.
Internet marketing challenge = 2-way dialogue
David Kilpatrick’s new book, The Facebook Effect, begins with a story of an unlikely viral Internet marketing phenomena. Oscar Morales, engineer and self-described “computer addict” in a small town in Colombia, decided to make a new Facebook page railing against the Colombian rebel group, the FARC. Kidnappings by the FARC are so common that Colombia has a nightly radio show designed to reach the jungle-bound hostages and give them hope. Each evening, families of those held captive line up outside the radio station in Bogota, hoping to send words of encouragement through the airwaves to their loved ones.
You know you have a kidnapping crisis on your hands when you have an entire radio show dedicated to kidnap victims, and Morales was fed up with it. His anti-FARC page attracted 1,500 Facebook friends in less than 24 hours. In one month, the group organized a worldwide march against the FARC, which drew the participation of 10 million in Colombia, and another 2 million worldwide (Source: The Facebook Effect).
Internet marketing challenge = mastering the art of discussion
Every business wants the kind of Internet marketing results that Morales achieved with no money and hardly any effort. To do so, however, they must make a fundamental paradigm shift. For decades, they’ve only spoken at consumers; to succeed today, they have to speak with consumers.
Morales hit a nerve with people; he opened up a topic people wanted to talk about. Instead of backing away from a free form, unmoderated conversation with customers, companies have to master the art of having that discussion while still setting the tone.
The great difference between the Elder Wand and the Internet is that there’s only one owner of the Elder Wand at any one time, but multiple Internet marketing wizards can wield the wand of the Internet with equally amazing results. It’s not luck that makes an Internet marketing campaign go viral; it’s talent.
Nowadays everybody wanna talk like they got somethin’ to say
Some have even claimed that Twitter was strictly a 2009 phenomena, and that Twitter is entering a long, slow decline that will eventually lead to its extinction as another internet species that just didn’t work out. (Friendster, anyone?)
